Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
Very Funny. Very Serious.
Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin
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Every court gets one eventually. The unvetted outsider who holds no office, runs nothing, answers to nobody, is despised by the entire palace — and has the emperor's ear anyway. Russia got Rasputin. America got Laura Loomer, and this week she finally crossed the blood-brain barrier for Nick Mortensen, who has spent years scrupulously refusing to discuss her. That refusal ends now, and Dr. Craig Johnson — UC Berkeley lecturer, PhD in fascism studies — is on hand to explain why the comparison isn't a joke.
First, the numbers. Craig comes in at a six, and his is the structural one: the federal fight over mail-in ballots went through a full whiplash cycle this week, with the Supreme Court clearing a procedural path for the administration's Postal Service rule, a district judge lifting her block, two dozen states immediately suing over the final rule itself, and the courts fighting about it again within days. Craig's read cuts through the litigation: nobody is ending mail voting. They only need to make it harder enough, in enough places, for enough people — and the House stays where it is. He reaches back to Dred Scott for precedent on federal overreach in a rightward direction, and tells a Soviet joke about a midnight mob and the young men in suits chasing after them, asking which way the people went so they can lead them there. Nick names the moment: a new low. Not the fun kind, where somebody embarrasses themselves on the White House lawn. The structural kind, where a branch of government signals it will hand over whatever gets asked for.
Nick's six is the woman herself. He explains, honestly, why he's avoided her — partly to deny her even a growing platform, and partly because he didn't know how to talk about her without walking into misogyny. That second problem gets real treatment, including the story of how Nick very nearly minored in feminist history in college and the department chair whose discouragement he was certain was secretly a Willy Wonka test. It was not a test. There was no prize. What follows on tape is a genuine tightrope act, performed with full awareness of the tightrope.
The résumé: born 1993, Project Veritas alum, coiner of her own verb, self-described proud Islamophobe, banned in her day from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, Uber, and — most impressively — Lyft. She chained herself to Twitter's headquarters. She ran for Congress twice. And in this administration she has become something no title could contain: the woman who walked out of a single Oval Office meeting having gotten National Security Council staffers and the director of the NSA fired. Trump, asked about it: she's a very strong person.
Then this past week. Loomer posted a video naming five Black women — Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — and attached to them a slur so squalid that Nick reads it exactly once. In the same thread, she wrote that she knew it would be called racist. She posted anyway. Nixon — Florida's brand-new Democratic Senate nominee, fresh off a primary upset — answered with the reply of the year, involving Queen Latifah, a certain dog food video, and a closing instruction: when referring to me, it's Representative Angie Nixon. However, you can call me Senator. Loomer's escalation from there lands, in Craig's professional estimation, somewhere between the nineteenth century and a mimeographed neo-Nazi zine. It's the kind of racist, Nick observes, that makes racists quit — do I sound like that?
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced her — a thousand percent, calling this Trump's new MAGA and wanting nothing to do with it. Which brings the show to the history: we get into the feud that Loomer has had with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and we should all appreciate Nick's restraint in not characterizing it as a "beef." There is a documented prior chapter between these two women that you will simply have to hear to believe, and Nick walks through it on the narrowest tightrope of the episode. Craig's live reaction is its own review.
The analysis is where the title gets earned. Everything on Loomer's résumé is designed to be ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is the mechanism: the White House can use what she says and disown who she is in the same breath. She absorbs the damage — she's a sin eater for them — so nobody with a title has to say the thing. She wasn't invited to Pam Bondi's Epstein binder photo op alongside Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, Liz Wheeler, and DC Draino; every one of the binder kids was a punchline by July, and the woman who didn't get invited outranked the room she wasn't in. Her two million followers aren't the point. Her audience is the enforcer class — she doesn't persuade the public, she audits the staff, and the NSC firings were a loyalty audit delivered by a woman with no job. Craig lands the historical comparison: Rasputin — unvetted, running nothing, hated by the whole palace except the emperor, cultivating strangeness as part of the persona. Nick adds Barbara Walter's term for figures who build a brand on division as a country slides toward conflict: ethnic entrepreneurs. And then the tell — Loomer's July about-face on Ukraine after interviewing Zelenskyy in a Kyiv bomb shelter, admitting she'd been bamboozled by Russian propaganda, with Trump amplifying the clip approvingly. Craig closes on the bleakest sentence of the night: one of the dividing lines in the new Republican coalition is going to be whether you're openly antisemitic — and there are living voters who remember the last time that was ordinary American politics.
Along the way, a somber marker: it has been nearly a year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and Craig — who was teaching in a classroom when it happened — gives an unplanned, remarkable stretch on what he feared that day, why the killer's identity denied the movement the martyr it wanted, and how the absence of Kirk, who would have turned 35 just in time for 2028, is quietly reshaping two elections.
The back half belongs to the WNBA, having the best season in its thirty-year history — record ratings, sold-out expansion teams in Toronto and Portland, a landmark players' contract — and to the manufactured campaign to turn the league into a culture-war front. The full primer: the Breonna Taylor season, the league that wore Vote Warnock shirts against its own owner Kelly Loeffler and flipped a Senate seat the day before January 6th, Brittney Griner's ten months in Russian custody, the racialized discourse that arrived with Caitlin Clark. Then the six-week manufacture: a buried Sophie Cunningham quote, OutKick and Clay Travis attacking the league from both directions in the same month, fifty demonstrators and a guy in a frog suit, and Enes Kanter Freedom — a genuine Turkish dissident who knows exactly what it means to be hunted for who he is — taking a baseline seat at Natasha Cloud's game to target her for who she is. The number that ends the argument: transgender women who have played in the WNBA in thirty seasons — zero. The closest the league has come is Layshia Clarendon, nonbinary, beloved for twelve years. It's a debate about nobody, aimed at the somebodies on the floor, and Craig traces the protection myth beneath it all the way back to Birth of a Nation. Natasha Cloud gets the last word, in a letter to trans kids who were never in the building: you belong, you're loved, you're seen.
This is the commedia for your particular tragedy — comedy about fascism, autocracy, and the authoritarian playbook that somehow stays fun to listen to. The abyss is better with friends.
Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Laura Loomer, Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, Elon Musk, Kamala Harris, Lindsey Graham, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, Queen Latifah, Ashley Moody, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Barbara Walter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sophie Cunningham, Caitlin Clark, Clay Travis, Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, Natasha Cloud, Brittney Griner, Kelly Loeffler, Raphael Warnock, Breonna Taylor, Layshia Clarendon, Olivia Miles, Natisha Hiedeman, Paige Bueckers, Jason Williams, Colin Kaepernick, Billie Eilish, James Cameron, Rasputin.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
That's a 19th century level of racism. That's a neo-Nazi mimeographed magazine level of racist. That skinhead talk during a concert in the 90s in like a barn, they would say shit like that. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?
SPEAKER_00I think I'm at a six, maybe a high six, freaking out about voter suppression. It's becoming pretty clear the roadmap that the Trump administration has to stealing the midterm. Frustratingly, it's exactly what it was so very obvious they were going to do the whole time. And everybody seems to have spent the last two years telling people that it wasn't going to happen, and it's so clearly going to happen. Anyway, it's pissing me off.
SPEAKER_01You're talking about the postal suppression, right? Uh yeah. And what did was it last Monday that the Supreme Court decided that he could make the Postal Service have something to do with uh elections? If the state doesn't give the Trump administration their voter roles, then they won't be able to have ballots.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the Trump administration seizing control of how elections work at the federal level by using some of the powers in the constitution, some of the only powers that the constitution specifically does grant the president, which is the regulation of the postal service. And the postal service is one of the only parts of the federal government that is in the constitution. It's just like in there. And so since mail-in ballots happen via the postal service, their argument was, oh, well, we can regulate them, therefore. And a bunch of states sued Massachusetts with spearheading this and said, like, no, you can't. Elections are run by the states, which is historically how it's been for 250 years. And the Supreme Court voted along precisely the lines that the listener knows that they would, that no, in fact, the Trump administration can uh restrict mail-in voting in the ways that it's trying to. Now, these states are appealing. It's possible that they'll successfully appeal, but that's just not going to get through by November. And even if it does, we'll just go back to the Supreme Court. That's gonna say the same thing. Trump administration is not ending mail-in voting, and it's not eliminating the vote in these states, but it's making it harder enough. That's all they need to do. They just need to make it harder enough for a couple 10,000 people in certain districts to not be able to vote, and then they can keep the house, and that's it. That's what they actually need.
SPEAKER_01So that's where I'm at. It's enabling itself to make more rules. Federal elections are one thing, state elections are another thing, never the twain shall meet. That's the basic premise of the United States. Yes. That was always a red line in the sand. That's why it's these United States, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Separate states, one federal government. That's a real line that he's crossed. It is. Of the several dozen that he's crossed, this is the kind of stuff that the Civil War was ostensibly about. And I don't mean that in the sense of the Southern states wonning states' rights. I mean the opposite. One of the precipitating events of the Civil War was that the Supreme Court made a decision, the Dred Scott decision, which said that enslaved people were enslaved no matter where they were in the U.S., essentially eliminating states' ability to regulate that. And so it was the federal government overreaching in a right-wing conservative direction that moved on that issue. And that's what this is. I think it represents a new low.
SPEAKER_01Terrifying. Not in the fun way. Yeah. Where these people are doing something horribly embarrassing. It's not ATVs on the front lawn of the White House. It's not a new embarrassing low, but it is a new low because essentially the Supreme Court signaled that they're willing to do whatever the fuck that guy wants. They'll just give it to him whatever it is. There's still a part of me that thinks, ah, you know, they explain it pretty well. I don't know if I understand the explanations. It's one of those things where they're not gonna enjoy it when people appeal it or try to get a stay. There's some legal explanation here, and they're not just fucking us over. I still think that. I'm torn on this one.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. When I study fascists from the past in Germany or Argentina or the Klan, there's a debate always about whether the guy in question is a true believer, like if he really seriously believes the things that are coming out of his mouth, or if he's like a Johnny come lately, right? Following the zeitgeist. There's a Soviet joke, which is you wake up in the middle of the night hearing a clamor outside, you go look out your window, and there's a crowd of people, hundreds of them, running down the street carrying signs and torches. They're going too fast for you to read the signs. And you watch them pass, you start to go back to bed, but then you hear another noise outside, and it's a handful of young men in suits with glasses, and they see you hanging out the window, and they call up to you and say, Excuse me, can you tell us where the people went so we can lead them there? So some people are like that. They're following the people, but some of them really believe it. And like, I don't fucking know about the Supreme Court. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I grew up thinking these people were so unassailable. You hear about Thurgood Marshall and Alan Page and all these American heroes to find out that no, they're just people and they can be compromised fairly easy. A lot of them are compromised from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00Clarence Thomas might believe it.
SPEAKER_01What about you, Nick? Where are you at? Uh, I'm hanging out of six. Laura Loomer, man, she did it. She finally crossed the blood brain threshold for me. I have scrupulously ignored Laura Loomer since the jump. I knew she existed. I knew she cut her teeth with open racism towards Muslims. Yeah. She doesn't rate in my mind. There's a couple of reasons. I don't want to talk about it. One, I don't want to give her the platform. We're growing each week on the show. We're doubling listeners each month, and I don't want to give her even the smallest platform. Two is I don't know how to talk about her. Anything you can say about her is equivalent to saying that she's a dumbee. You're gonna venture into that neighborhood very fast.
SPEAKER_00That's how the commentary always ends up going for her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But it's the heart. I don't want to labor under the misogyny because I've very nearly minored in feminist history in college. I took a bunch of lower-level courses. When it came time to declare a minor, I went into the chair of the department to get her sign-off on it. She told me that she was happy that I was interested, but that there were some women in my cohort that were adult women, non-traditional enrollees at the school, divorcees with children. They were coming into this new information about feminism, and it was heavy for them, personal. And my presence as a man in the classroom might inhibit that. Then she said she couldn't stop me and it was my call. She wanted me to take the weekend and mull it over. And I did. And I was a little angry about the discouragement at first, but she had a pretty legitimate argument. I think anyone that would have gotten to the point where they were ready to take higher level courses. To the point where they wanted to declare it a minor, would be able to see what he he needed to do. Honestly, I was hoping that it was like a Willy Wonka test where I'd show up on her door Monday and be like, I found your arguments persuasive. And as somebody that's read the lower division stuff about feminist history, uh, I don't want to impede discovery about all these things. And then I would have passed the test. And she would be like, Yes, you can. You're now allowed to minor. We were waiting for you to say the right thing. I was 21 at the time. That wasn't the case. It was a quick how do you do? And she gave me a signature in my paper. No prize at all. Wouldn't even get so much as a high school jock head nod when I'd see her walking in the halls. I don't think she even remembered who I was. Our meeting may not have played a big role in her life. Certainly not as it played in mine. So I've always been pretty content to let Laura Loomer do her thing. I want to talk about someone's looks. I'm not gonna say anything about how, as a woman in her 20s, she decided to fill her face with fillers and cosmetic procedures to the point where it's unsettling. But it's important color for her. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Some of this stuff, I mean, you're right that it's difficult to talk about because it's talking about a person's body and specifically a woman's body, and stuff that they've done, presumably in order to pursue attractiveness. I think that it is true that like a lot of people today, and I think this is especially true of a certain type of commentator or like internet personality, part of what they're pursuing is something more like notoriety or singularity, like being clearly and only them. That's part of the reason that they're willing to say wild shit because they want the piss ass from it. And so, like choosing an appearance that's this uncanny, valley, disturbing level of transformation in your facial structure. It's part of the job, which is just wild. That's what's up. And I mean, you know, I guess like body modification is something that people do, and like lots of people do it for lots of different reasons. But like this strikes me as a bad one personally.
SPEAKER_01Lumer makes you feel weird and angry at unrealistic beauty standards to the point where you start blaming yourself for her. For Loomer, whatever her thing is, what's driving it is some deeply uncomfortable stuff. Deep shame. When you talk about Laura Loomer and you don't mention that she's changed her physical appearance to the point where you think she's wearing a scary old mask and is shockingly close to resembling Jigsaw, the antagonist for the horror movie Saw. It's a real disservice. It's one of the more illustrative points of who Laura Loomer is. I want to do right by the show, and I want to do right by my respect for the feminist movement, so I've devised a clever mechanism whereby I've already talked about her appearance by saying that I don't want to talk about her appearance, and I'm hoping that I can slip that by people. I'm glad you said it. It's just a tip of the cap to all those people out there who are saying don't talk about women's appearances. I know. This is Laura Loomer, and this is a lot of weird, okay? Yeah. It's a tightrope act. It is. It's hard. I don't know if I did it perfectly there, but I made an effort. And I think that uh the audience will respect that.
SPEAKER_00I'm holding up a card that says 6.5.
SPEAKER_01Just to tell people who Laura Loomer is, if you're not from there. Born 1993, Arizona. She worked for Project Veritas for a couple years in her early 20s. That's the right-wing hidden camera getcha thing. She's ambushing people on camera was sort of her thing. And she got good at it. Yeah. To the point where she started telling them that they got loomered. She called herself a proud Islamophobe. She was banned from Twitter in 2018, back when you could get banned from Twitter for saying bad things. And in response, she chained herself to Twitter's headquarters in New York, wearing a yellow star. She's been banned from Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, Uber, Lyft. Lyft. She got banned.
SPEAKER_00Lyft?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Lyft. I don't think I've ever heard of them banning somebody. Damn. In addition to that, she ran for Congress in Florida twice. She won a primary in 2020. She lost in the general. Yeah. And then she lost in a primary in 2022. Said it was rigged. In September of 2024, she posted that the White House would smell like curry if Kamala Harris won. She actually posted a 9-11 conspiracy video the same week. She traveled with Trump to the 9-11 memorial, something last year. Oh. Lindsay Graham objected to that. Marjorie Taylor Green objected to that publicly on the record.
SPEAKER_00That's the thing that makes a loomer loom large over the discourse. If there's a person that makes Marjorie Taylor Green appear like a reasonable statesman, something is so fundamentally off track you can't even begin to talk about it. It's just so Oh my god. Like, I don't even know.
SPEAKER_01Madge Taylor Green and Loomer, they got a history. They got bad blood. Marjorie Taylor Green sued Loomer a few years ago for saying that she had Arby's in her pants. There are depositions that you can read that go into detail about what Laura Loomer meant when she said Marjorie Taylor Green had Arby's in her pants. What that means is that you have some sort of labia menorah situation where they're longer than pronounced. It's it's just a mean girl thing to say. That was harsh. Even while being deposed, Loomer refused to concede. That's what she meant when she said Marjorie Taylor Green had Arby's in her pants. Loomer insisted under oath in a recorded deposition that she meant that Marjorie Taylor Green had literal Arby's in her pants. Like she was wearing cargo pants and loaded up the pockets with Arby's. Presumably doing one of those five for five dollar campaigns. That's wild. Wouldn't give MTG the satisfaction of admitting under oath that she was mocking her badge. Let's get back to Loomer. We told you who she was from a personality standpoint, and everything on that list is designed to be ridiculous. You might think that makes her easy to dismiss. It should, but the problem is when she says something, the White House can use what she said and disown who she is in the same breath. She absorbs this damage. She's like a sin eater for them. Two weeks ago, we said this about Tucker Carlson. The goofiness isn't a flaw in the product, the goofiness is the product. Loomer is the purest version of that. Absolutely. She's a person whose entire job is to say the thing, so nobody with the title has to say the thing. She got the national security chair fire. Press secretary? And she's got reach. Loomer's got two million followers on X, a show on Rumble. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But that's not her power. Her power is that she's met with Trump. She's met with JD Vance. She's on a schedule that most cabinet members would kill for. Here's the part that should scare you. She doesn't persuade the public. She audits Trump's staff. Her audience isn't voters, it's the enforcer class, the people who decide who's insufficiently loyal. And that's what the National Security Council firings were a loyalty audit delivered by uh one woman with no job within the administration. This is her on X. She said Trump ordered his staff to hire her four times. They refused all four times. Gatekeepers have tried to keep her out, and yet she still has Trump's ear. People keep asking whether she's an op. She might be.
SPEAKER_00If there is a political actor in the United States alive today who is closer to the embodiment of the Batman villain, the Joker, I don't know who it is. She's out there fucking stuff up, agent of chaos, up to and including physical transformation into something that appears to be out of place. It's part of the performance in some ways. The other comparison that people often make to Lumer, and I think that this is really helpful, is Rest Butin, a weird outside talker who has the ear of the Emperor and doesn't really do anything, doesn't actually technically run anything, and hasn't been vetted by anybody, and nobody in the palace likes them except for the Emperor. Res Butin is the example. Similarly, carries around this air of physicality and difference and distinction that he also intentionally pursued, that was part of the persona. I think that's all there. The Trump administration has two halves in my mind. Halve number one is that the instincts of the 70s clan are just in the White House. We're just gonna do all the shit that those people would have wanted. And the other aspect of it is what if shock jocks ran the country? That's how these people talk. That's what they sound like. You know, if you listen to an AM radio talk show guy, they'll kick off one or two of those in their career. And in the 90s or 2000s, it would make a big splash that somebody like Limboss said something wild and crazy. But because of X, Loomer is just a fucking machine gun. Every single day, multiple times a day, they'll say crazy crap like this.
SPEAKER_01There's no stopping her. There's a book called How Civil Wars Start and How to Avoid Them by Barbara Walter. She says that when there's a civil war that's about to happen in a country, people rise up. People that see an opportunity to build a brand on top of leading this type of division. They're called ethnic entrepreneurs. Are you familiar with the term ethnic entrepreneur? Do I have a good grasp on that?
SPEAKER_00Basically, exactly that. The idea is that the person stakes out a claim and is trying to establish territory, like in a business type way, to say, like, okay, well, I'm gonna get a certain share, certain portion of the audience or the take.
SPEAKER_01Constantly bidding against each other to be the worst possible person, the person that's willing to say the most. There's one other thing about Laura Loomer that I think is very interesting and important because it's a tell. For years, Loomer said that Ukraine was a country full of Nazis. She told Putin to take the whole thing. But in July of this year, she went to Kiev. She sat in a bomb shelter doing a missile attack, and she interviewed Zelensky for 45 minutes. She came away with from that saying, quote, I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda. Loomer's explanation for how it happened was that getting banned from American platforms pushed her onto Telegram, where Russian media lives. So she's become somewhat popular there. I don't know exactly what to do with that. Some of it reads like kind of a reckoning. That's interesting. Trump responded to what she had said on TroSocial by posting the clip with a quote that said very good with four exclamation points on the bottom. Strange. A senior Trump administration official told a newspaper that Loomer has Trump's ear. Could be a change of heart for Loomer, or it could be her influencing Trump to go in a direction that I think we all kind of want President Trump to go in when it comes to helping Ukraine versus Russia.
SPEAKER_00That's confusing. I mean, I think it's indicative of the fact that these people don't really care all that much about foreign policy, which is a big change from the previous Republican coalition, the neocons. They were all about foreign policy or at least outwardly. It's all about controlling the Middle East and even her anti-Islam, even her Islamophobia stuff. In the 2000s, that would have had this foreign policy inflection. Oh, we have to go stop blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we have to save people and yada yada yada. With the new fascist inflection in the Republican Party being more anti-Semitic and therefore no longer as pro-Israel, I think that they're turning toward a more domestic Islamophobia and being opposed to Islam in the United States, not caring as much about foreign policy. That's my read on it.
SPEAKER_01Loomer's interesting because in addition to all these things, she could never really fall in with the Tucker Carlson gang because one, they've already got Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's a version of her, but she's a fervent Zionist too, Laura Loomer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It is truly awful that one of the dividing lines in the new Republican coalition is going to be are you openly anti-Semitic or not? That's gonna be one of the big dividing lines. It's gonna be part of American politics again. And it was only in the 50s that we started to get rid of that. It's not that old. There are people around who are voters who remember that. Again, this is like 70s clan politics. Like I was saying earlier, mimeographed neo-Nazi propaganda from the 90s. It's just what policy is now.
SPEAKER_01It's getting bad out there, and Laura Loomer is like harbinger of something about to get even worse. We have to keep our eye on her, I guess. Now that she's past the blood-brain barrier, she's somebody to consider. I didn't want to get to this point, but here we are.
SPEAKER_00You know that onion article where it's a picture of a fictional new pop star, and the headline is like, another one? The body of the article is like, yes, this is another name you now need to know. I will be in front of your eyes over and over again, and you will know two of my songs. Laura Loomer feels like that. It's like, oh my god, I have to know about this one.
SPEAKER_01Ugh. That's Billie Eilish with me. I thought I could get away with not knowing about her. Yeah. And then James Cameron's doing documentaries with her. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh no, I gotta know who she is now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I did Titanic, man. That's a big deal. If you're gonna do a rock and roll documentary, it's probably gonna be the best one of all time in some way, shape, or form.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably it would be. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I gotta watch that at some point. Now I gotta know all about Billie Eilish. That wasn't one of the goals I had in life.
SPEAKER_00I'm too big a metalhead to like pop music. That's my out.
SPEAKER_01This past week, Laura Loomer posts a video in a thread. She names five women Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayana Presley, Corey Bush, and Judge Katanji Brown Jackson of the United States Supreme Court. All of them, except for Katanji Brown Jackson, are either candidates or current members of U.S. Congress. Corey Bush is a candidate and a former member of U.S. Congress. These are some important women. They got one thing else in common. They're black. Laura Loomer calls them, and I'm just gonna say this once, quote, ghetto entitled race obsessed, destructive black bitches. Unquote. Jesus, man. That's the kind of racist that makes racists quit being racist because they're like, is that what I sound like when I'm being racist?
SPEAKER_00God. That's mask off. She is playing to a particular crowd, and she knows it. She doesn't seem to care.
SPEAKER_01Throughout the rest of the week, and it got worse. There was quite a back and forth between her and Angie Nixon. Laura Loomer published a story about Angie Nixon's teenage daughter getting in a car crash. And Nixon replied, You ate dog food on camera. And she did. It's on video in 2024. She did it for money. I mean, it wasn't dry food, but you know, she did it. That's wild. Who is Angie Nixon, you might ask? She's 42. She's from Jacksonville. She's a Florida state rep. She's confirmed to be a DSA candidate. And she just won the Democratic Senate primary. Laura Loomer called her a bitch after that. And then Nixon quoted Queen Latifah by saying, quote, who you calling a bitch? And she actually added Queen Latifah in doing so, which must have been some real fun for Queen Latifah. Just living her life, doing Queen Latifah things, catching strays. She was smart enough to stay out of it. The way that Angie Nixon closed it out was by saying, quote, when referring to me, it's representative Angie Nixon. However, you can call me Senator. Loomer replied, Quote, I called you a ghetto bitch because you are Angie and your record proves it. My God. But you speak Ebonics, so maybe I need to bark at you and tug your leash. Then you'll finally understand.
SPEAKER_00Surprisingly race. That is surprising. That's a 19th century level of racism. That's a neo Nazi mimeographed.
SPEAKER_01magazine level of racist that skinhead talk during a concert in the 90s in like a barn they would say shit like that that's crazy that's like stop by her house level of racist Laura we know you say lots of crazy things but what's going on here what's really undergirding this you know telling a black woman that she's gonna yank her chain I don't know what that is exactly it's a way of her I think indicating that she's got the kind of power to do that yeah I'm surprised by that and I hate when I get surprised by these people personally I would like them to stop surprising me.
SPEAKER_00Not only do I like being right and so I don't like being surprised I want them to be done. I would prefer it if they stopped I don't want them to keep going if there's gonna be a first prominent US pundit to just use the N-word it's gonna be her. If she did that right now like if she tweeted that now as we're recording this couldn't be surprised couldn't be surprised weirdest fucking political timeline possible Dr.
SPEAKER_01Craig it has been nearly a year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. You and I didn't know each other at that point I'd be interested to find out what did you think of it at the time and what do you think of it a year out.
SPEAKER_00For those listeners who need a refresh Charlie Kirk was a pundit activist in the United States he dropped out of college in order to be a youth agitator. He founded Turning Point USA which was and is the biggest right wing advocacy network in the college and also high school level in the United States big youth leader. He was in his 30s and was one of the most successful right wing organizers of the 21st century in the United States. He was shot while giving a speech at a college about this time last year, I think it was September last year. He died almost instantly was shot in the neck and when this happened I was in the classroom I was teaching when it happened I don't let students have phones in the classroom. They pulled out their phones the moment class ended and people started talking about Charlie Kirk I had a flashback to being in middle school on September 11th and walking down the hallway. This isn't going to reflect well on the kind of person I was in middle school but in middle school on 9-11 I was walking down the hallway I was in band when the attacks happened so I didn't know I was walking down the hallway and people kept talking about the World Trade Center. My first thought then as an 11 year old or whatever was like why the fuck do these people know what the World Trade Center is? That was my thought when Kirk got assassinated too was like there are only bad reasons that the people in this classroom would be talking about Charlie Kirk. Either he's running for office or he has been attacked. It turned out he'd been assassinated I was terrified I was like this is an inflection point it could be it could be an opportunity to really crack down on people if the assassin had turned out to be say a member of DSA it would have been an opportunity for the Trump administration that they would have pursued to put people in jail possibly including like Ocasio Cortez or something. Who the fuck knows what it was going to be it was a big inflection point on the right for a while there was some indication that it might have been an intra-right wing fight. It kind of was there was an indication for a couple days that it might have been a Fuentes supporter who killed Kirk for a while Nick Fuentes was freaking out and was like well am I gonna get got turns out the guy was just terminally online and believed a bunch of incoherent business which meant that instead of being a martyr against the left Kirk could only be a martyr in general. This turned out to be a lot less useful for the right wing. His wife has taken over his spot but she doesn't have the juice she's not as good at it as he was I think that a year out my big takeaway is more than his assassination, the absence of Charlie Kirk is really transforming the midterm and especially the presidential election. Charlie Kirk was going to turn 35 in November 2028. He was going to be barely eligible to run for president and I betcha he would have run and possibly gotten a VP or something like that, some position in a cabinet or whatever. He was a rising star. Now he's dead. Historically there's been a lot of crackdown against people who criticize Kirk professors have lost their jobs pundits have lost their jobs people have been banned from platforms simply for noting the things that Kirk did and said not even like actual libel just here is a quote of something that Charlie Kirk said because for a while the right was trying to make him into an unassailable martyr. And they're still kind of doing that. You know they're talking about like oh we'll make a statue and blah blah blah but I think the fact that he wasn't killed by organized leftist which is what they wanted and hoped it's made it impossible to put him on that pedestal.
SPEAKER_01I think that was the ideal thing that could have happened to him.
SPEAKER_00He did all that stuff all that notoriety a year later he's forgotten about I was relieved I was deeply relieved when it turned out that his assassin was not a member of an organized leftist movement. I was scared I'm like D-list in all of this shit but I was starting to be like do I know people who know people I was freaked out I was scared frankly there was a couple of those signs that said we're all Charlie Kirk now with now and all caps underline and I was like what the fuck does I don't what do you mean you're all Charlie Kirk now?
SPEAKER_01We're all out for revenge that's kind of what I thought it was that's kind of what I thought it meant too. I thought it was gonna blow up into some major conflagration I'm glad it didn't I want to talk about the best season in the history of a sports league not a good season their best one ever by every available metric the WNBA this year is their 30th season. Viewership is up 15% over last year and last year they already had a record. At least one game every single week since July 12th has pulled in more than two and a half million viewers national broadcasts on network TV you can pick it up for free on your digital tuner on the Ion network women's pro basketball. In August two expansion teams this year Toronto and Portland uh they both sold out their home openers Toronto set the all-time record for the league in July 20969 people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah when the Valkyries started playing in San Francisco it was a huge deal here and you see people walking around in Valkyrie's gear as much as you see people walking around in 49ers gear or if you're not watching it you should.
SPEAKER_01There's a player named Olivia Miles on Minnesota that is setting the league on fire as a rookie. She wears goggles she plays the most dazzling game of basketball you can imagine. There used to be a player named Jason Williams White Chocolate who's this showman in the NBA this is about as close as I've ever seen to that Olivia Miles. I do follow Minnesota because I know a guy who's the adoptive father of one of the ladies on the team Tasha Heideman. I've been watching him all year and this Olivia Miles is the thing apart. She's incredible okay so last year WNBA revenue was over $200 million. And in March of this year the players union won a new contract. The average salary of WNBA player would now be over half a million dollars. They'd have a housing parental leave a real dedicated facility for every team after a year of showing up to the All-Star game in shirts that said quote pay us what you owe us the WNBA started paying players what they were owed. That's this season the best in 30 years. So naturally the number one story about the WNBA in August of 2026 is two retired men's NBA players who decided that they want to be drafted. They're going to become ethnic entrepreneurs themselves here's a quick history because it matters for what's coming the WNBA started in 1997. They were backed by the NBA for most of its life it was treated like the NBA's little sister summer league charity case for most of those years it was the most politically active league in American sports not by a little by a lot their baseline is that they have the most openly gay players in any professional league. That was kind of a big deal not too long ago in 2020 the bubble year the players dedicated the entire season to Brianna Taylor, the young woman who was summarily executed in her sleep by cops in Louisville while they were serving a warrant to the wrong house. Brianna Taylor's name was on every jersey during the bubble season. Here's one that kind of matters about the WNBA one of the owners of the Atlanta Dream was a sitting senator Kelly Loffler might remember her Republican Georgia. She wrote a legal letter that year objecting to the Black Lives Matter stuff that they had on shirts. And the player's response every team in the league was to show up in shirts that said vote Warnock, her opponent who was only polling 9% at the time and Warnock won. He flipped the Senate it's a big deal at the time it didn't make too much of a splash in the news because it happened on January 5th 2021. The next day was January 6th Kelly Leffler sold the team after that she was no longer welcomed by the players in the league. This league has already beaten ascender. That's not trivia that's the reason for everything I'm about to tell you. They had a player named Britney Griner. She was detained in Russia. She had a nine year sentence for a THC vape cartridge. She spent two months in a Pinot colony eventually she was freed in a prisoner swap. The whole ecosystem on the right spent those 10 months that she was put away deciding whether or not she deserved to come home because she had knelt for the national anthem. Over the last couple years the league has gotten this new star names Caitlin Clark she's white she's from Iowa heterosexual universally marketable as great as she is as a player the discourse immediately became about race. Who's fouling Caitlin Clark when they should be thanking her for people caring about the WNBA all for their bump and sours why are people so jealous of her that wasn't by accident the WNBA is a league that's mostly black women and they got a white superstar and half the country decided that she's being persecuted when she got fouled too hard. Ain't that America who plays in this league it is mostly black women a lot of openly gay black women not a few a lot out on camera.
SPEAKER_00Whereas as far as I know the NBA has no out players who are currently playing and like the NFL doesn't either the NBA doesn't they're so out there's a woman on the Dallas team Paige Bukers that was able to leverage her team into drafting her girlfriend which was very interesting.
SPEAKER_01That is this is a very gay friendly league. They don't hide it sound Cameron. The people in the league are 67% registered Democrats somebody counted. So black gay unionized political and doing well for themselves getting bigger and more relevant each year. If you were gonna pick one league to turn into a front in the culture war I don't know how you'd pick a different one. But here's how the last six weeks have gone down because it didn't happen by itself. In July ESPN runs a long profile of a player named Sophie Cunningham placed for the Indiana fever Caitlin Clark's teammate good player tough sixth woman type she kind of made a splash in meme culture for a gif where she just points at another player on the other team for a long time and it absolutely infuriated the other player was a kind of a great gag. It's a good bit I don't know if you've ever seen that gif. No I have seen it and it's very it's it's it's a good bit. Buried in this ESPN article a few paragraphs where she says that women's sports should protect female athletes from her words biological males. It's a view that most Americans hold and we'll get to that because what she said didn't blow up right away. It just sat there a few paragraphs in a much longer story. Then it got aggregated an outlet called Outkick got involved. Outkick is a sports site owned by Fox. It was founded by Clay Davis who is now an anchor on Fox. He's more or less the replacement for Pete Heggs here's what they did and you gotta appreciate the game here. Travis found a transgender basketball player in France and DM'd her on Instagram and asked her if she'd like to play in the WNBA. That transgender basketball player from France said sure she'd love to they published it as a story quote the NBA won't recruit her. Then Clay Travis went on X and called the WNBA transphobic. Okay. A Fox owned sports site attacking the WNBA for not having a trans player. Two weeks later they were attacking it for the possibility of having one both directions same month same outlet. Then the rally started Seattle Portland protests outside of Indiana fever games. ESPN counted with 50 demonstrators and about 20 reporters asking them about it. There was a guy dressed as a frog. Was it in Portland?
SPEAKER_00Uh it wasn't in Portland I think it was this one was in Indiana but the the frogs are okay because Portland protesters they dress up in big old inflatable onesies all the time.
SPEAKER_01And the sign said trans people just want to live. I don't know what the frog was for but I respect it because I don't know if I would have seen that sign otherwise early in August we hit the reductio ad absurdum moment a guy named Enos Cantor Freedom a former NBA basketball player announces that he's decided to declare himself eligible for the WNBA draft. Another former player Royce White follows he played exactly two games in the NBA about 14 years ago he had to quit because he was afraid to fly. He never got accommodations from the NBA over it despite maintaining that the Americans with disabilities act entitled him to those accommodations for his anxiety was a pretty interesting story. And I was on team Royce White at first I really thought they should be accommodating players that have anxiety issues. Yeah why not? I'm in favor of that August 23rd Enos Cantner sits courtside at an Indiana fever Chicago sky game in Chicago baseline seat which is on the court he's wearing a black t-shirt it says quote woman noun adult human female Natasha Cloud a Chicago sky guard scores a basket late in the third and turns around and walks at him yelling he puts his hands up he steps onto the court and makes like a motion so come at me bro he didn't get too far in the court security's in between them in two seconds but he got what he wanted he got the camera. Yeah he's ejected escorted out mission accomplished because it's all over social media in seconds I want to tell you who Enos Cantor Freedom is because it's not what you'd guess. He's Turkish he played 11 years in the NBA for the Knicks the Celtics the Thunder and he was a genuine Turkish dissident. He was a glenist yeah he used his platform as an NBA player to criticize Ergan's government. Turkey revoked his passport put out a warrant for him his own father was prosecuted put into jail Kantner could not travel back there. He couldn't travel out of the country at all with his team to Canada because Turkey might try to grab him. So he became a naturalized U.S. citizen changed his last name from Enos Cantor to Enos Cantor Freedom when he became a citizen. He didn't stop his politicism at that point either. He went after the NBA over the relationship with China. He talked about the Uyghurs he talked about forced labor making LeBron James's the league did not love him for it. He said he got blackballed a few years later and he might have been right. I'm telling you all this because it's true. This is a man who knows what it's like to be hunted for who he is literally sit with that for a second. Here's the other thing about that baseline seat Enos Cantor Freedom was sitting in it wasn't random. Cantor Freedom and Nakasha Cloud have history. In July 2023 Natasha Cloud posted that America was quote trash in so many ways. This is after several Supreme Court rulings but most likely she was talking about 303 creative versus Allenis which ruled a Christian web designer could refuse to create websites for same-sex weddings. Canther went on Kannity and Fox and friends and he called Natasha Cloud and several other American athletes uneducated, offered to fly Natasha Cloud first class to China if she wanted why he said quote just ask your colleague Brittany Greiner one of those if you don't love the United States leave routines. She answered him respectfully she said she respected his lived experience in his country and asked him to respect hers as a black gay woman in this one. Pretty much the right thing to have done. Three years later Cantor bought a seat on the baseline at her game wearing a shirt that said woman now an adult human female despite knowing exactly what it feels like to be targeted for who he is he picked one woman for exactly who she is and about the biggest audience possible. Now Natasha Cloud didn't talk to reporters after the game she met with security and then she posted quote to each trans kidslash person, you are part of my community and tribe you belong you're loved you're seen you're perfect as you are to me and you will always be protected by me. Badass. Her coach said that Cloud was actually worried that she'd become a distraction and he told her that no she wasn't she was doing the right thing. Here's a quiz for you Dr. Craig how many transgender women have played in the WNBA in 30 seasons?
SPEAKER_00As far as I know there has not been an out trans athlete in any professional sports league in the United States. So that'd be zero.
SPEAKER_01Not one not that they've disclosed the only player in the league who wasn't completely cisgender was a woman named Lee Sha Clarendon who's non-binary and she was assigned female at birth. She retired in 2024 played in the league for 12 years other players in the league were overwhelmingly supportive of her and remain so to this day. That's the only thing that they've even come close to having a transgender player in in 30 years and that's it. It's the whole league. And the rules according to the new contract the players just signed in March say quote only players who are women are eligible. The NCAA banned trans women from women's sports last year, the Olympics 27 states the president of the NCAA told Congress that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of more than 5000 college players total across all sports. So this is a debate about whether a player who does not exist, has never existed, could exist in the league without running afoul of the rules the old what do you mean by woman routine? Kantner and Royce White have declared for the WNBA draft, whatever that means, to protest this policy one that already says pretty much what they want it to say it just doesn't say it hard enough. People rallied in Seattle against the notion that a player who has yet to materialize could theoretically happen and whether the WNBA is doing enough to prevent something that hasn't ever happened, but might happen someday, possibly What do you think that tells you about the state of the world today, Dr. Craig do you think that this is a discussion that we should all be having do you think this is a distraction? What the fuck is going on with this? Oh my God. The only reason I'm asking Dr. Craig is because I think that you probably have something to add on the topic. You really straighten me out a good deal on people under 18 having access to the same medical care as everybody else did a few weeks back. I would like to hear what your thoughts are on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah so this is the culture war. That's what you raised before that's exactly what this is. The Republicans and people who are opposed to trans rights in general which includes some Democrats have figured out that sports is the wedge issue for this that the fear of women and girls participating in sports with women and girls who are not cis that is trans women or trans girls that is something that will like get at some people especially people who don't have trans people in their lives or at least who aren't aware of the trans people in their lives. So there's one layer in which that's what this is that the Republicans and other people who work with the Republicans or people who are unwittingly doing work for the Republicans, they are doing this wedge issue shit. They're driving a wedge in preparation for the midterm and then ultimately the presidential election because the Republicans are going all in on anti-trans ideology and there's a part of the Democratic Party that is chasing that. Because as you said, a majority of people in the United States are opposed to these kinds of rights. They do want to restrict trans women from being in sports. Very very rarely are they specifically talking about trans men being in sports which is part of what is really happening here. When we think about what fascism is and how the right wing works and how the right wing deals with gender, the right wing is inherently misogynist and fascism especially a lot of fascist mythos, a lot of the mythology about fascism is about protecting the nation and protecting women specifically in a paternalistic controlling way. Who are you protecting those women from other men, other violent men. That's the fascist dream. They want to be protecting their women from other violent men in the original version of this myth in the United States is best shown in the movie Birth of a Nation. The white knight of the Ku Klux Klan rides in on a white horse and saves a white woman from a black man. This, this anti-trans shit, is the 21st version of that we are saving white women from trans women. That's the rhetoric here. This is why it's so much shit about who gets to be in bathrooms because it's about the specter of a type of violence that doesn't happen as opposed to the type of violence that does in fact happen, which is cis men committing domestic and sexual violence against both cis women and trans women. It's built on a lie, but it's built on an anxiety that's I think it's foundational to what the United States is this anxiety about the protection of specifically white women. I think that that's part of what's happening with the WMBA is that it's getting more popular. It has this white star. And so like I don't know if it would be as functional in the zeitgeist if this white star weren't there if it were instead still thought of as a primarily or predominantly this league of women of color. I don't know if it would still have the same valence for people as opposed to college sports, which is where this percolated is like banning trans women from college sports and they won that. The fact that they won is in some senses a problem for them because it means they can't keep beating the drum. They have to keep going. They have to take more territory in the culture war. That's what this is. As for the sports or athleticism part of this on a personal level I could care less. It is true that there are certain athletic activities where if you have had more testosterone in your body throughout your development, you might be on a statistical level predisposed to be better at it. If you think about all the caveats that were in that sentence who fucking cares? Who fucking cares? Do the players care? Seems like most of them don't do the fans care? Probably most of them don't am I willing to engage in discrimination in order to arguably make a better athletic competition? No. That's just less important so who cares?
SPEAKER_01That's my opinion stare into the abyss with friends the Autocratic despair podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast 15 minutes of fashion available wherever you get your podcast
